Constant Ringing & a Fat Lip

Greetings from the center of hell... wonderful of you to stop by and visit.

Yesterday a detective working on my theft case called to let me know he was correctly working on tracking the IP Address. I was rather shocked to hear from him as I didn't expect anything to come from my "report" I gave to the officer on Monday. He told me that there may be puddin' in the salad though, because the internet service provider that was linked to the IP Address, Comcast, used a pool IP, as in a user may only use a certain IP Address for a few days before it's thrown back in the pool and given to another user. I had high hopes from that too! A small part of me is still hoping something comes of this, the other, larger part of me is yelling from across the hall, "Shut up stupid and face the facts, your bag is long gone."

I have to say, not just my wallet is suffering from this whole situation, as you can imagine, I've been down in the dumps since Saturday. I missed my workout Sunday, only did 30 mins on Monday, managed to get a full workout Tuesday and skipped it on Wednesday. I'm hell bent and determined that I will not give up though. I feel like crap, I have 0% motivation, but I'm going to force myself to pull through it and out of it. In the morning I'm going to do a full workout to make up for the one I missed on Wednesday and also my normal evening workout to cover Thursday.

Thursday & Friday I'm going to play phone tag with insurance companies until I find one who handles equipment insurance that a person can afford. I'm not ashamed to say that I'm terrified that the only working camera I own and the one lens I have left will spontaneously explode. I'm scared to leave the house with it, but I'm horrified by the thought of leaving it home incase the house explodes. I use to have equipment insurance with State Farm, I contacted them Monday and they said they no longer did that, but I could take out business insurance with a premium 3 times as high as the equipment insurance and a deductible of $1000.00, unlike the $100.00 deductible I had before.

To add some more sunshine to my days, I found out Tuesday that my operating system on my laptop had a virus. I did successfully get rid of it but not before it corrupted all my software files and did a good number on my harddrive. I went to my good ole buddy Rachel's house today, armed with pizza. She was nice enough to fix it for me by restoring it back to it's factory configuration. In order to do that one must have the system disks that came with the laptop, which I, of course, left at home. A 20 min drive, one way, to my house to get them and back, 4 hrs or so later it was fixed and as good as new. Watching her do her magic voodoo, I realized I know nothing about computers. Thanks Ray-Ray

Anyone who knows me can tell you that I wait until the last minute to do anything, I always have and most likely, always will. I signed up to show two of my framed and matted photos at the Chattanooga Nature Center Art Show months ago. I haven't done one thing to get ready for it thus far and I have to deliver them to the center TOMORROW! My hearts not really in it but I'm going to give it an effort in the morning and see what comes of it. The motivation for getting these finished would be that the prints are offered for sale at the show, anyone who reads this knows I'm ready to start collecting cans from the highway, so selling a print would be beyond fantastic.. in fact you should all go take a look and buy them both to grace your living room walls!

The reasoning for the title of this post, "Constant Ringing & a Fat Lip" comes from my 3 1/2 week long ear infection and a odd, painful spider bite I have just under my lip that I woke up with yesterday. First, my ear infection which just doesn't want to go away. I took medicine for it until it was 1/2 way gone, and of course the other 1/2 was in my camera bag, so I managed to get my hands on some more. It doesn't appear to be helping because it seems to be getting worse instead of better. It's been stopped up since Saturday and a constant ringing, which I can not get to go away has been with me since Saturday night. I'm going to give it another 24 hours and if I see no change for the better I guess I'll be going back to the doctor. While I'm there I suppose I should get the spider bite under my bottom lip checked out. I noticed it there Monday evening, I'm 99% sure I got it from the spider web I walked through on the steps of the Church while I was giving my statement to the police officer Monday. Tuesday morning when I woke up, my bottom lip was swollen to twice it's normal size and hurt like you couldn't believe. The swelling had gone down by Tuesday night but the bite is still clearly visible and still hurts to touch. Tuesday also brought a virus of some sorts, or maybe it was the spider's poison making me sick, so I was pretty under the weather all day and most of the night. Apparently someone is trying to kill me from the looks of it all. I'd have to say they're doing a pretty good job, I'm not too sure how much more I can take.

If you wonder why the photo of Linus, I've done nothing but whine and complain since last Sunday, I found it rather suiting, wouldn't you say? :o)